Having learned that the infant Oidipous was passed from one shepherd to another in the highland pasturage somewhere on Mt. Kithairon, the Chorus makes the inference that he was conceived there, a place inhabited by no people save, perhaps, the occasional shepherd, but said by myth and legend to have been populated by gods and lesser divinites. These verses contribute freely to this mythopoetic tradition by conjecturing the lovemaking of various mountain-loving divinities at large in the wilderness landscape. The tone is exuberant and filled with delight, as though nothing more pleasing could be brought to mind. Less seemly scenes nonetheless do come to mind, for the mountain slopes imagined by the Chorus as the site of an erotic frolic are those that Laios and Iokaste selected for the slow death of the wounded and trussed infant born to them when they could or would not forego sexual intercourse. The Chorus’s imagination of Kithairon as the playground of the gods stands in stark contrast to the Kithairon that serves the Theban royal family as a gruesome dumping ground for the products of its impious sexual activity. [Md] [P] So carried away is the Chorus with its own fantasy that it reverses the facts, recasting impious mortals as gods. This mythopoiesis makes itself immediately suspect. The citizenry’s preference for new myths reflects the fact that it is no longer willing to accept the moral obligations imposed by traditional myths. The audience can therefore judge the Chorus’s jubilant proclamation of new myths to be both ignorant and impious. [Mpei] Presuming the reference to new myths to remind the Athenian audience of its own celebration of new myths through the tragic festival itself, it might now view its own improvisatory myth making as a misbegotten attempt to hide from itself the ugly facts of intemperate and impious hegemony. [Gt-a] [Gm]